Category Archives: Theatre

I was intrigued by a recent article in the NY Times on the current dominance of small plays.

According to the author this is largely a result of economic factors. Rising costs, tighter budgets, stingier punters, all have helped bring about a renaissance in two and three handers. This ‘much lamented shrinking of the theatre’ is a phenomenon which we in Australia have long been familiar with. Our industry has contracted even more severely – for we were never so big to begin with – to the point where Australian playwrights write small, practical plays as a matter of course. When was the last time an Australian playwright penned an epic on the scale of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Country? And why would they when they know it will never see the light of day.

But is economics the only thing at work here?

I don’t doubt how strongly controlling financial factors can be. But it seems something else is going on; a bigger, broader aesthetic shift taking place. Here are a few highly praised artworks from recent times that spring to mind. (This is an utterly unrepresentative and completely personal survey but anyway.) In fiction, the all conquering The Road by Cormac McCarthy. In film, last year’s game-changing Samson & Delilah by Warwick Thornton. And in theatre, David Harrower’s Blackbird which I can’t help but feel has been the most influential play of recent years.

Despite the difference in art forms, there’s a connecting thread. It’s a sort of minimalism, a distillation of content and character, a return to what is essential about a form. Whether it be the sparse, apocalyptic prose of McCarthy, the hunger and silence of Thornton’s Australian faces and landscapes, or the jagged, rupturing dialogue of Harrower, all three eschew complex representational affects in favour of a brutally honest aesthetic. It’s a kind of hyper-realism; a heightened realism that paradoxically achieves its effect by a reduction of detail. No flights of fancy, no glossy celluloid moments, no chorus lines of boa feathered girls, no multiple perspectives or cut-up narratives. Just a plain old artistic sock to the jaw.

Blackbird

My gut instinct is that this is partly being driven not by economics but by changing audience expectations. We are such highly-trained and specialized consumers now: people are innately very canny when it comes to cinematic and theatrical technique. From watching thousands of hours of television and film your average punter can cut through surfaces that would have bedazzled earlier generations. In order to impress these folk you have to cut away all the blubber and give them something raw. If you listen to Warwick Thornton talk about Samson & Delilah and you get a strong sense of this. He describes the need to peel back the layers to get at something true, something that might speak in a way that a complex psycho-drama could not, something anybody and everybody can watch – in any language – and still be moved by.

Of course (and out come my biases) this sort of thing has always been the purview of theatre. Especially so since film rose to the top of the cultural heap. Theatre, once the home of grand spectacle, has had to adapt and (returning to its roots) become small, localized and authentic. Given that our industry has been lean from the beginning this is something that Australian theatre-makers learnt early on. The virtues of minimalism, the necessity of invention, these are qualities that Australian theatre has always had in abundance.

But what is causing the shift in film and fiction?

Those with a historicist bent would probably pin it on the global financial crisis or something similar. But I don’t think it can be so easily explained. I think Thornton is probably closer to the truth when he says we are actually getting smarter as cultural consumers. Why else is every person I know currently consuming The Wire at a rate that makes a crack-cocaine addict look mild? Why is it that movies like Inception and The Dark Knight are raking in coin when in previous eras we might have been flocking to Rambo? Why, for example, did Baz Lurman’s Australia fail so dismally? Was it simply a poor script? Or was it because it had lost touch with the times? Sure, Crocodile Dundee is still a lot of fun, but only for nostalgia value.

Perhaps this is far too optimistic (and self-congratulatory) but I’m an optimist at heart.

I was, I have to admit, a little worried as I made my way down the familiar set of stairs at 45 Flinders Lane last night.

The idea of an all-male Macbeth, set in a jail, has some cheesy potential. It could have been cheesier than a deep fried wheel of King Island Blue Brie. But a number of my most trusted carrier pigeons had informed of its excellence. And, I’m happy to say, they were right.

From the moment I entered the theatre I was overwhelmed by the energy, intelligence and courage of this production. Manbeth is ensemble theatre at its best. There are no ‘outstanding’ performances here; and I mean that as high praise. This is a murky, muddy world in which every player must slip and slide in and out of multiple characters in order to keep his head above water. This requires theatricality – genuine theatricality – a quality which this production summons up in spades. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I saw more of it in the first five minutes of Manbeth than can be squeezed from entire mainstage productions.

And the interpretation fits the text perfectly. I understood immediately – from looking at the row of bare wooden benches, the dilapidated, stained white wall along the back of the space, the ensemble in their matching prison uniforms, the simplicity of the lighting with its long black shadows – that I had entered a disenchanted, Hobbesian world in which power was the only available language. These naked men (often literally) are little more than a pack of dogs. They circle one another, waiting for a sign to start tearing at each others throats. This image is occasionally made concrete throughout the production when the ensemble bark, howl and play out canine tableaux. Of course this is a mainstay of prison drama: the yard, the cellblock, these are dog eat dog places.

Like Roman Polanski’s 1971 film, this version of the Scottish Play seems to suggest that we could – any of us – in a given moment become a Macbeth or a Lady Macbeth. And history, having begun with violence (rather like the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey), is destined to endlessly repeat a pattern of violence, suppression and revolution. To me this is the difference between interpretation and window-dressing. These days we see far too much of the latter, attempts to ‘modernise’ a text, to let it ‘speak’ once more (as if a true classic could forget its voice?). It is like changing the colour of the curtains or moving the furniture around and expecting the shape of the room to change. An interpretation, on the other hand, preserves the original intention or spirit of the text. Rather than bringing it forward to us, it takes us back to it. In this sense Manbeth is a triumph: it is hands down the strongest, most supple interpretation of The Scottish Play I’ve seen in a long while.

A few directional things I’d like to applaud. First, clever use of space. Too many shows at fortyfivedownstairs back themselves into a corner or play in a needlessly restricted space. Manbeth manages to use the whole space effortlessly. And I’ve never seen actors climb up those goddamn pillars before! Second, I liked the way in which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were split in two (good & bad). It worked particularly well during their soliloquies, but also helped provide an extra layer of complexity in terms of character motivation and imagery throughout. For example, with Banquo’s murder I got to see an image of Macbeth holding himself back, as if he wanted to stop what he had set in motion but could not. Third, the use of all-male cast. In any all-male scenario the issue of homoeroticism will inevitably raised. Kudos to this production for tackling it head on: rather than a sprinkling of ‘tick the box’ moments there was a genuine thread woven right through the fabric of the piece.

Manbeth exceeded my expectations in every way. If you like your theatre docile, pre-masticated and lifeless then it’s probably not for you. However, if you want to be shaken by the scruff of the neck (until it almost hurts) then this is your show.

NB: My only reservation was the name. Manbeth just doesn’t have the right ring? It summons up images of men rolling around in baked beans or something. Can anyone come up with a better one?

In Ewan Leslie, Simon Phillips has found the perfect vessel for Shakespeare’s vilest villain.

Leslie owns the stage as Richard. He drags his mangled foot across it so loudly it becomes a kind of second voice. He saws the air violently with his mangled arm and thrusts it so forcefully into his pocket that you fear he is about to burst his jacket lining. The half-demented grin on his face, and his tongue, which is often exploring the lesser-known corners of his mouth or lolling out over his lips, gives him the bizarre aspect of a maniacal child with some sort of mental defect. On one occasion I even saw a great cataract of saliva rush forth from his mouth as though he lacked control over his gastric juices.

It’s an incredibly visceral, palpable performance and one that deserves to remembered, most of all for its cheeky sense of humour. Leslie brings a sense of contemporary humanity to this famously inhuman monster. It’s a joy to see him having such a good time in the role. He is constantly in conspiracy with the audience: we cannot help but like him. This binds us to him so that, in our own small way, we share in his fate. It’s a very clever piece of playing which ensures that the more serious ensemble set-pieces function in counterpoint to, rather than as an extension of, our relationship to the protagonist.

Ultimately it is Leslie’s force of character which drives the production, giving it a dynamic balance of humour and menace, and it is his inexorable rise and fall that grips the audience. Which is all as it should be.

This Richard III actually kicks off with a scene from Henry VI, Part 3 in which we see Richard murdering Prince Edward. For an audience not familiar with the ins and outs of pre-Elizabethan history (as Shakespeare’s audiences were) it’s extremely helpful. Thus by the time we get Richard alone on stage by for his famous opening sililoquy

Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York

we have a sense that this is not a beginning but a continuation. When Richard wins, brushes away or does away with subsequent characters (Lady Anne, his brother Clarence, the two young boys) as easily as if he were swatting at flies it never seems implausible but somehow intuitively and dramatically logical. Richard’s rise to power, we understand, will be as unstoppable as the tide of history itself.

Simon Phillips’ direction has a very filmic quality to it. Filmic is a word often used in a derogatory sense in the theatre, code for something that lacks essential life. But nothing could be further from the truth here. This production teems with life. Though every drop of technical capability is squeezed from the Sumner theatre – TV screens, projections, flying props, sets and actors, trapdoors, smoke machines, translucent scrims, glass walls, rising coffins and podiums, enormous revolving sets – none of it detracts from the theatricality of the piece. It is, rather like Benedict Andrew’s mesmerising Season at Sarsaparilla a couple of years ago, an example of how well-used technologies can open up new dimensions in an old text.

The most interesting element for me (again, like Sarsaparilla) was the use of the revolve. It gave the production a sense of perpetual movement, the scenes flowing seamlessly onwards, which I felt well suited well the onrushing, inevitable feeling of the play. This worked differently to the revolve used recently in Michael Kantor’s Elizabeth. There it seemed to create the exact opposite impression: of mice endlessly running on a treadmill but getting nowhere. With no walls, and very little in the way of props, Elizabeth‘s revolve helped Julie Forsyth achieve a sense of fixity and stillness even though she was a whirling dervish of movement. (The revolve seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment: I saw Neil Armfield use it again in Peter Carey’s Bliss last night.)

In Richard III the revolve allows set changes so swift and sharpthat they resemble a camera cutting between scenes. After the play I was talking with one of the actors and he mentioned something which helped the penny to drop: apparently the creatives were hugely inspired by the West Wing series. They seem to have drawn on the way the camera often follows characters between rooms or down corridors (rather than cutting) which give that strong ‘halls-of-power’ feeling. In relation to Richard III this makes perfect sense considering the contemporary setting and the obvious references to US politics.

Me and me again

The whole idea of film, TV and new media feeding back into theatre raises some interesting questions about representation and what we expect from certain aesthetic forms. This excerpt from Marxist film theory (a massive tangent I know) might help make some sense of what is going on in theatre at the moment:

Just at the moment when black-and-white film had achieved a sufficient standard of technical sophistication to enable filming to be done on location more or less at will, essentially liberating both the camera and the narrative from the closeting confines of the studio, colour film was introduced.

As transformative as the look of colour would prove to be, its lighting requirements were such that in the early years, at least, location shooting was almost impossible. But once colour was introduced, black-and-white films immediately began to seem less expressive than they used to, their ‘reality effect’ loss its efficacy, until at a supreme moment of reversal black and white became (as it is now) the sign of art house expressionism. In deciding whether to shoot in black-and-white, or colour, directors had to choose between looking real, but feeling artificial, and feeling real, but looking artificial.

If we take these arguments and apply them to theatre it becomes possible to see similar forces at work. With the rise of new technologies, mainstage companies are now able to ‘represent’ reality in ways that we have become accustomed to seeing it, that is with filmic resemblance. A backlash against this has led to a fetishisation of poor, trash or junkyard theatre, which revels in its aesthetic limitations and restrictions. By making a virtue out of bare necessity, and rejecting the need for versimilitude, these productions often seem to contain more life and authenticity. Like in film, these older but rejuvenated technologies (‘I will show you a man in a dog suit instead of a dog itself’) have come to possess a greater reality effect, whereas new technologies stink of false doubleness.

We even find this dialectic playing out in Richard III. I am thinking of the momenttowards the end of the production when Richmond and Richard present themselves to us a politicians. With the live flesh-and-blood person before us, and the simulacra of their close-up face projected behind, we are forced to compare reality with unreality. First we get the media savvy Richmond, channeling Barrack Obama, a smooth and capable orator. And then Richard comes to the podium, and in a lovely moment that endears us to him more than ever, he pauses. He cannot, or will not, read his pre-written speech. He scrunches it up, looks directly at us and launches into a froth-mouthed tirade. With his hunched back hooked over the lectern, and his glowering face all screwed up, he looks neither smooth nor capable. The strange and interesting thing is that, once again, we somehow prefer this ugly monster because he seems more real than his opponent.

There will always be those who will detest the MTC, and what they do, simply because they are the MTC. Which is entirely natural: we need to maintain the rage in the independent sector in order to maintain our own sense of identity. We have to denounce culture to have counter-culture, right? But for what it’s worth, I think this is an outstanding production. It is, dare I breath the words, mainstage theatre at its best.

Richard III is a triumph of large ensemble, set-piece direction. Like last year’s August: Osage County,it will prove to be a huge hit for MTC, and a well-deserved one.

I only have major gripe to air. The whole night I was gleefully waiting for Richard to chainsaw one of his victims to giblets.

My kingdom for a chainsaw?

…

How's my comb over?

As an afterthought…Leslie’s Richard looks a lot like Hitler, don’t you think?

But even more than the real Hitler he resembles Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Hitler in the Downfall, which has spawned so many great Youtube parodies, God bless ’em!

When Mrs. Somers awoke one morning from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed into a monstrous woman.

A housewife, for no particular reason, begins to find herself indescribably revolting. To escape her body, she consults a plastic surgeon and undergoes a series of massive physical transformations – slowly evolving into something truly monstrous. PRETTY BABY is a surreal high-speed mash-up of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the ‘body horror’ of David Cronenberg, and silver-screen Monster movies, satirising contemporary constructions of femininity and incising into the ‘female grotesque’.

CAST:
Anne Browning
Georgina Capper
Francis Greenslade
Peter Houghton

Commissioned by Melbourne Theatre Company (Young & Emerging Artists)

Developed by:
Brooke Antulov
Ash Flanders
Chloe Gordon
Ben McEwing

TICKETS: Full $10 / Conc/Under 30s $5
BOOK: In person at the MTC Theatre Box Office, call 03 8688 0888 or pay at the door
And Facebook action is here.

Over the last six months a bunch of us have been developing new work as part of a development project kick-started by MTC’s Associate Director Aidan Fennessy.

We’re now at the stage where we are going to be showing our work in a series of public readings at the Lawler Studio.

The pieces are eclectic, original, and unlike anything you will have seen on Melbourne stages this year. They range from evocative to Pinteresque, magical realist to politically incisive, comedic and absurd to darkly horrific. There should be, without doubt, something in there for the whole family.

The three readings (all @ 7pm) are:

Wed 11 November is Elise Hearst & Sam Strong’s The Sea Project

Thu 12 November is Amelia Roper & Naomi Edwards’ Hong Kong Dinosaur

Fri 13 November is Declan Greene & myself with Pretty Baby.

Come along, have a glass of wine with us, and tell us what you think of the work. We’d really love to hear it.

Some of you may remember the Apocalypse Bear from our first season of Melburnalia.

Penned by the inimitable Lally Katz, The Fag from Zagreb (set in leafy Kew) was an eldritch subversion of domestic bliss in which a schoolboy comes home to find an ominously caring bear in place of his mother and sister. Darkly hilarious, it was an immediate favourite with audiences – and a rewarding piece to work on in the rehearsal room.

I was stoked to discover that The Fag from Zagreb, along with Lally’s two accompanying pieces, will be performed as an Apocalypse Bear Triptych as part of the MTC’s Studio Season. I can’t wait to see what Luke Mullins & co do with it: get in fast because I reckon the tickets for this will sell-out early.

Opens next Thursday and runs until 24 October.

Plus, if you are still hankering for more bearish adventures, you can hop over to youtube and watch a couple of great Apocalypse Bear shorts directed with Lynchian overtones by the very talented Nick Verso.

I was at a fantastic play reading last night: Nicki Bloom’s Tender at the Lawler Studio.

Apparently the play has already done the rounds in Sydney and elsewhere. But we hadn’t seen it in Melbourne yet. And, seriously, what a talent. So young too: she wrote Tender at the tender age of 22, I believe.

Anyway, I was chatting with a mate afterwards about theatre and the like, and it got me thinking.

The essential gist of the conversation went like this:

He said he thinks design is the most important factor in theatre today. I disagreed and said it is (and always has been) the word. Which, to me, seems to sum up a whole raft of debates that have been going on in theatre (post-theatre, devised theatre etc) for quite some time.

Whether we liked it or not, we both agreed that our present culture is more image than text literate. For better or worse, there is no going back. Logos has had its day.

However – and this is where it gets tricky – just because we’re better trained to read images now than text, does that mean that image can (or should) replace the word?

Can image ever be the driving force (or structuring principle) in the theatre? I think not. I think – and I am aware this is going to make me sound incredibly conservative and more like a 90 than a 27 year old – that theatre, by definition, is about drama. And drama, in turn, is based on the word.

I can already hear people shouting at their computer screens as they read this. Surely, they are yelling, theatre has always been a combination of word and image?

Which is true, theatre does include image, movement, and so on. But a case can be made that these things are non-essential. By which I mean, theatre can exist without such them. But theatre cannot exist without drama. A silent play, for example, must still be dramatic. (I’m thinking of Beckett’s Act Without Words I & II). Because no matter how cut-up, fragmented, devised, run backwards, undermined, rough, holy, poor, decaffeinated or otherwise, the audience will still interpret and form the raw material into a narrative pattern, in other words, into a drama.

That’s what I mean by drama; it’s not spoken word, or writing on a page, but the very thing that holds it all together. It’s a structuring principle that we bring into the theatre with us. No matter how clever the artist, he or she cannot disarm the audience of this faculty.

Now, I’m not saying we should all immediately stop what we are doing and start making neat, clean, old fashioned drama. On the contrary, a lot of the best of what I see is pushing at the boundaries of drama, is aware and conscious of these constraints, works within them, subverts them, twists them, turns them upside down, empties them out and puts them back again. But I do see a lot of shows that seemingly fail to notice the very tradition they are working within, the structure they are standing on, and so are often incredibly yawn-worthy; not because they lack edginess or a great design, or slickness, or prettiness, but because they haven’t yet woken up, are still unconscious. In other words, it’s not yet theatre.

For me, theatre is closer to poetry than anything else. It can take on, or borrow from, other forms. But it remains, in essence, an activity that a people do with their ears and mouths.

Design will never replace the word. A great many people may try (and currently are) but the word will remain central. Because, to remove the word would mean, by definition, that theatre is no longer theatre.